Hello everyone,
I saw descriptions of EHX soul food overdrive pedal:
-transparent overdrive
-......more headroom and definition

Could you please tell me, what does "transparent" and "headroom" means?
Thank you very much!!

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I can't believe nobody has replied to this? Basically it's very simple


TRANSPARENT: just means it doesn't "color" or impact the sound. EG the sound in sounds similar to the sound out, but with a boost, it gets louder going out but still sounds like it did going in tone wise. Make sense? So oany folks want their boost to be "transparent". The typically boost pedal is based loosely on an ibanez tube screamer overdrive.

HEADROOM: Think about head room as the gap between your guitar signal level sounding good and the point at which is would distort/squash/sound bad. The space in between those spots, roughly.

The easiest thing to do is to buy a very cheap but decent overdrive and experiment. You can always spend wads of money on an overdrive, I've done it, everyone has done it. But at first you can really sound good with something less pricey but well built.

To wit!!

$35 Joyo Overdrive (sounds like a tube screamer, I've owned them and they rawk)
But it's a free country, just a suggestion

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Thank you Todd!

What Todd said. In internet guitar speak it means keeping the the general EQ of the instrument in tact while adding volume and/or distortion.

*I'll add though that a Tubescreamer (and it's variants), even with the gain completely off will give you a mid-range bump. Which guys like, especially live, because it helps solos cut through a mix. Also, the 'Soul Food' is a Klon Centaur clone. The Klon (every version of it) has a big boost in the midrange - that's what it's known and desired for.
A 'clean' boost would be something more like the Xotic RC booster, Catalinbread Super Chili Picoso or EH micro-amp, etc. One of the best clean boosters you can get is an EQ pedal with a level control such as the Boss GE-7 or PQ-3.

Caveat:
The word 'transparent' is thrown around a lot but it's almost impossible to attain unless you're playing through a PA system that can handle all the highs and lows that an electric guitar is capable of producing. Most guitar amps, tube or solid state are actually focused on the mids. That's where the guitar sits.
Once you add any gain into the equation there's really no such thing as 'transparent' as any and all distortion changes the EQ structure of whatever you add it to. This is fundamentally what distortion is. So take the word transparent with a big grain of salt.

Headroom: if you don't have a lot of it you'll easily send an amp into clipping (distortion) by boosting (clean or otherwise) the input. This can be good or bad depending on what you're going for. What this means in the real world is that if you're driving your amp really hard i.e., volume/master volume up past about 6 or 7 - you're not going to get anymore actual 'loudness' out of it by stepping on a boost pedal. You'll just get more saturation - distortion and compression. It's just like being in the red on a recording channel. You can't get louder, just more distorted.

Thank you Klasaine, your explanation is very clear!